In limit hold 'em bets and raises are equal to the big blind.
A big area of growth in the online casino business is, without a doubt, poker rooms.
On the flip side, the nice thing about table poker is that you don't have to hide your skill from the casino, because they earn their profits from a "rake" of the bets at a table, so they really don't care who wins. In fact, skillful poker players are hailed as some sort of folk hero, judging by all the publicity that tournament winners receive at events like The World Series of Poker that's held every year in Las Vegas. It should be the same for skillful Blackjack players and, to a degree, that's the case when it comes to tournaments, but I've always felt that the casinos are a little leery about hosting such events because of the fear that hoards of card counters will descend upon them, when in fact, card counting is of limited value in a tournament. However, I will say that a good portion - probably a majority - of those who enter the "high stakes" Blackjack tournaments are counters and what else are they going to do in between tournament rounds?
Okay, let's drop the philosophical stuff and get back to the topic of making $$$ at table poker. I don't know if you've experienced an on-line poker casino, but it was a revelation for me when I downloaded the software of a couple of them. What I found was poker in an automated format. It's literally click and play with all types of nifty features that would be impossible to incorporate at a brick-and-mortar version: no sweating over the "etiquette" of the game because you can't break a rule if you tried; the total of the pot is displayed and updated bet-by-bet (helpful when figuring the odds of a play, which I'll get into later) and you are basically anonymous, beyond displaying your "handle" and, most of all, the game proceeds very quickly, at least twice as fast as most games in a brick-and-mortar casino. I'm constantly fascinated by the technology that is developed for the Internet and on-line poker is no different.
Think of the possibilities. Not sure if a Flush beats a Straight? No, problem, just tape one of those "cheat sheets" to your monitor and you're set. In fact, you can have all types of helpful information right next to you as you play, which is something neither of us is likely to do at a "real" table. Well, that got me thinking maybe the world needed a "GameMaster's Poker School" that was designed to teach people how to play a winning game of poker - Hold 'em poker, in particular - just as I have tried to do with Blackjack. Also, because of the very nature of the on-line games, poker played on the 'Net is less of a "people" game and more of a "mathematical" game, although I won't rule out the human element entirely. That said, it's still a game of probability, expected value and return on investment, just like Blackjack and Video Poker and, like those other games, it's relatively easy to calculate what can happen when there's only 52 cards in a deck.
Because all of the on-line poker rooms that I've visited up to this point allow you to try out their software in a play-money mode, the opportunities to practice your game against real, live opponents are plentiful and instructive. By their very nature, the play-money games aren't necessarily a reflection of how things will go for you in a real-money game (the play-money games can best be described as "loose", in the sense that raises come quick and often and you cannot bluff very effectively), but they do have considerable value. First of all, if you can't win at a play-money game, you simply aren't ready for the real-money version. Plus, playing for "fun" gets you familiar with how the software works and it'll give you the opportunity to not only test out my ideas, but to get organized so that you have the information I'll give you set up in a way that it's quickly and easily available.
I should mention that although I'll be focusing primarily on Hold 'em poker as it's played on-line, much of what I'll show you will apply to "live" poker games as well. In time, if you do as I say, you'll memorize most of the information you need to win and that should enable you to do well at your local, friendly brick-and-mortar casino, not to mention a poker night with "da boyz and/or gurlz." And yes, poker has been - for quite some time - a male-dominated activity but the Internet changes all that. Don't want people to know your gender? Fine, pick an ambiguous handle ("golfnut", "9 iron" and "wingnut" are some players I met recently) and the world won't know (or care) whether you're a man or woman, or something in between; all that matters is how you play. Of course, if you're "Sexylady", "Hooters" or "Psychoboy", people are going to make some guess as to your gender, although they may be totally wrong and I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. In my case, I use "Aceten" as a handle and I really don't care what people think I am; I'm there for the $$$, period.
(Source: GameMaster)
